In recent years, businesses have been making increased efforts to sell products and services through computers linked by interconnected computer networks. Many of these businesses have utilized the largest network today, the Internet, for such sales efforts. As known in the art, the Internet is a combination of large computer networks joined together over a high-speed backbone and data links. The Internet provides access to information stored on individual sites managed by various providers. As the Internet grows in its complexity, a greater part of population becomes more familiar with the skills required to access and communicate using the Internet.
Therefore, it is not surprising that many businesses use the Internet, especially a subset of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (the “Web”), as a significant sales channel and commerce forum. Web servers typically employ the HyperText Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”) to enable users to communicate over a number of hyperlinks that interconnect numerous web sites to each other. The web sites are usually created using the HyperText Markup Language (“HTML”), which is a set of “markup” symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for displaying on a web browser. The markup symbols typically direct the Web browser how to display a web page's words and images for the user. For more information on HTTP and HTML, see Internet Engineering Task Force (“IETF”) Request For Comments (“RFC”) 1945 and RFC 2616, and RFCs 1866 and 2854, respectively, all of which are specifically incorporated in their entirety herein by reference.
Its graphical environment makes the web ideal for supporting a wide variety of a “online marketing”. A few years ago, “online marketing” meant ensuring a good placement with web search engines. As the search engines and placements proliferated, businesses using this type of the marketing technique became increasingly undifferentiated. To solve this problem and, further, to expand many businesses' reach across the web, the businesses have adopted a marketing technique commonly referred to as “affiliate marketing” for advertising their products and/or services without incurring fixed costs.
E-commerce companies, such as Amazon.com and CDNow.com, pioneered the affiliate marketing. These companies created a system in which web publishers (“affiliates”) could build mini storefronts on their web sites and, thus, effectively push many merchant's brands to a broader base of potential customers. These storefronts have been typically developed in a form of promotions, such as banner ads, combining graphics and text into an appealing display of merchants' products. By placing the banner adds for products that are targeted to the kinds of people who traffic the affiliate web site, the merchants and the affiliates are able to conduct e-commerce “in context.” Thus, the merchants may place banner ads for travel books on travel web sites, and parenting books on sites for new parents, for instance. Typically, merchants pay no initial fee for placing banner ads on affiliate sites but, instead, the merchant pays a “per-action” commission to the affiliate sites. The “actions” may be a click-through, a membership sign-up, an actual product purchase, or a fulfillment relationship.
Affiliate marketing is popular among many merchants because it is predictable, measurable and profitable. By pushing different customer promotions to different affiliates, the merchant may recognize how well each affiliate is performing. Further, such arrangement enables merchants to continually adjust their marketing, merchandising and a mixture of affiliates to optimize the merchants' overall performance.
Despite its attractiveness, the conventional affiliate marketing is perhaps the least efficient and effective way to develop high-performance based marketing that results in positive returns on investments. First of all, the conventional affiliate marketing is built on an implicit assumption that all affiliates are good partners for all merchants. Typically, the vast majority of a merchant's affiliate sales come from a relatively small number of affiliate sites associated with the merchant site. As more affiliate sites learn to effectively influence the affiliate marketing channel, this small number of revenue partners may grow. However, it will never reach the scale of the hundreds of thousands of good partner sites that traditional affiliate marketing providers seek to draw to their networks, and, in the long run, these networks are obstacles to an effective affiliate channel performance. To recruit real revenue partners, merchants must either analyze a vast pool of affiliates, or they must commit to paying the ongoing costs of servicing and supporting tens of thousands of affiliate sites, of which, only a few thousand may actually create value for the merchants.
Furthermore, as affiliate sites grow in complexity to display an increasing number of merchants' products and/or services, many affiliate sites resort to building proprietary databases both to keep track of such products and/or services and also to enable visitors to search these databases in order to locate advertised products. As a merchant changes its product line, pricing or availability, the affiliates' databases must be updated to reflect these changes so consumers continue to see current information on affiliate sites. Therefore, the affiliate sites need to receive and store the most current product (or service) data from a variety of merchants, each of which may make independent decision about how to store and transmit data internally.
Currently, if a merchant site wishes to send product data to its affiliate sites, the merchant has to convert the product data into formats that its affiliate sites are able to process. If the merchant site has hundreds of affiliate sites, this process becomes so time consuming that many merchant sites choose to leave it up to the affiliate sites to convert the product data format into their proprietary database formats. However, many of the affiliate sites do not have resources available to do this, which, in turn, leaves them with unreadable product data that can not be processed.
Additionally, as many of the affiliate sites generate sales on a merchant's behalf, transaction data must be reported back to the merchant site to fulfill the sales and to ensure that the affiliate site receives an appropriate commission for the sales from the merchant. Because a single affiliate site may represent multiple merchants, the affiliate site may be forced to go through lengthy conversion processes to report the transaction data back to each merchant so the transaction data is in each merchant's preferred database format.
The complexity of this problem grows as a number of interconnected merchants and affiliates increases. In an exemplary system including two affiliate sites representing two merchant sites, a total of eight data conversions must take place if each affiliate site and each merchant site employs a different database format. In such a system, each affiliate site must convert, for instance, transaction data to the database formats of the two merchant sites, and each merchant site must convert, for instance, product data to the database formats of the two affiliate sites. Thus, for a system with ten affiliates representing ten merchants, two hundred conversions would be necessary if each merchant site and each affiliate site employ unique database formats.
Furthermore, as networked commerce grows increasingly sophisticated, merchants and affiliates recognize a need to share new kinds of information in addition to basic product data. For instance, this information includes tracking purchases of individual users on the Internet, as well as informing customers of up-to-date product availability.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and system that solves all of the above inefficiencies of the existing methods and systems.